Zionism's colonial "sugar daddy" 🧐 ... Some Israeli, including in academia, get really upset when #Zionism is classified as Settler-Colonialism ...
Weizmann requests following the Zionist Commission's visit to #Palestine in 1918 (after the publication of the infamous Balfour Declaration):
"...[But] we find among the Arabs and Syrians, or certain sections of them, a state of mind which seems to us to make useful negotiations impossible at the present moment, and so far as we are aware – though here our information may be incomplete – no official steps have been taken to bring home to the Arabs and Syrians the fact that His Majesty’s Government has expressed a definite policy with regard to the future of the Jews in Palestine”
Military Governor, Colonel (later Sir) Ronald Storrs reply to Weizmann indicates that, at least at this stage, the British thought they should not disturb the status quo of a Muslim majority territory:
“Speaking myself as a convinced #Zionist, I cannot help thinking that the Commission are lacking in a sense of the dramatic actuality. Palestine, up to now a Moslem country, has fallen into the hands of a Christian Power which on the eve of its conquest announced that a considerable portion of its land is to be handed over for #colonization purposes to a nowhere very popular people. The dispatch of a Commission of these people is subsequently announced … From the announcement in the British press until this moment there has been no sign of a hostile demonstration public or private against a project which if we may imagine England for Palestine can hardly open for the inhabitants the beatific vision of a new heaven and a new earth. The Commission was warned in Cairo of the numerous and grave misconceptions with which their enterprise was regarded and strongly advised to make a public pronouncement to put an end to those misconceptions. No such pronouncement has yet been made; …”
British Government, Public Record Office Cabinet No. 27/23 (1918). In Ingrams, Doreen. 1972. Palestine Papers, 1917-1922: Seeds of Conflict. London: J. Murray. pp. 25-26.
